A ilha-prisão de Ataúro durante a ocupação indonésia de Timor-Leste: histórias de encarceramento, resistência e legados contemporâneos

Abstract

The island of Ataúro, situated north of the capital of Timor-Leste, functioned as a prison island during the Portuguese colonial regime, more intensively from the 1920s onwards. During the Indonesian colonial period (1975-1999), the occupiers used the island to confine families of resistance members in open concentration camps, where hundreds of people died of hunger and malnutrition. In this paper, departing from an analysis of the memories and archival material on the former prisoners in Ataúro during the Indonesian occupation, I argue for the importance of telling and memorialising the histories of the island and people imprisoned there. Furthermore, I discuss memory and the colonial legacies, as some islands in the Pacific region remain territories deemed as repositories and detention sites for people fleeing from far away places marked by conflicts created by dictatorial and colonial regimes.

Keywords

• Australia
• colonialism
• memorialisation
• prison islands
• refugees